Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  As I put it down on the bed, the phone rang again. I checked the display. Another caller I didn’t want to speak to. Another one I had to.

  “Hello, Serena.”

  “Hello Sam.”

  “Look, I know you’re pissed off and I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  That wasn’t what I’d expected.

  “You’re not pissed off?”

  “Well, I was pissed off, and then I found out you’d actually got something useful out of the bastard, and my other client looks like he’s not going to be convicted of murder, so I think I can bring myself to forgive you. But do me a favour, please, Sam? Can you try to trust me?”

  “I did trust you,” I said. “I just didn’t think you’d trust me. I wouldn’t have done.”

  She laughed.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “But I do now. And by the way, you’re fine to go and talk to Carson whenever you feel like it, but I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I meant it.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s all turned out for the best, hasn’t it?”

  There was a script, in which Serena would yell at me for a minute, and then calm down, but not enough to say anything like it’s all turned out for the best. Mia Arazzi had followed the script: anger, mistrust, grudging acceptance. Serena was making hers up as she went along. Extraordinary woman, I thought.

  “Thanks,” was all I could think to say, again.

  “So where are you?”

  “Back at the hotel.”

  “Fancy that drink?”

  She’d given me the name of a bar she thought I’d like, a nice place, she said, with the emphasis on the nice, like I was some half-man of a southerner who wouldn’t be able to handle the dirtier side of Manchester. I guessed she was judging me on that chicken jalfrezi.

  It was just a drink, I kept reminding myself, as I sprayed on the deodorant, splashed on some aftershave and changed into a shirt almost identical to the one I’d been wearing all day, only a little less creased, plus the trousers I’d been wearing when I’d first driven up here and which had been resting over a chair ever since. My arm had started pounding, suddenly, a new and surprising reminder of Tarney and his part in everything that had happened, but I figured a drink would help fix that. A drink and the company.

  When my phone rang again I assumed it was Serena, checking where I was or making sure I knew where I was going, and I answered without looking at the screen.

  “Sir,” said an anxious voice.

  “Gaddesdon?” I asked. He sounded a little breathless and he was calling me sir again, but it was him all right.

  “Sir,” he said, “there’s a problem.”

  “What have you done now, Gaddesdon?”

  He’s said the wrong thing to the wrong person, I thought. He’s upset Sally Carson. He’s broken a vital piece of equipment. He’s pissed off Roarkes. He’s lost something.

  I was almost right with the last one.

  “It’s Sally Carson,” he said.

  “What about her?”

  “She’s gone. She’s just – gone.”

  23: On The Road Again

  THERE PROBABLY WASN’T anything I could do to help Sally Carson, but the idea of sitting in a bar with Serena Hawkes while half Greater Manchester Police were out there hunting for her client’s wife didn’t feel right. I dropped her a text apologising and explaining why, and then realised she probably already knew.

  It wasn’t just Sally Carson that had vanished. Gaddesdon had gone into the kind of detail that blind panic produces, the name of the sergeant in the protection unit who’d been sent to pick her up, the name of the constable who’d gone with, which route they’d taken to Bursington and how long it had taken them to get there. None of that mattered. What mattered was that when they’d arrived, there was no sign of Sally Carson and no sign of her son, either. None of the neighbours knew where she’d gone. Her car was missing from the driveway. Apart from the occasional visit to Folgate, and then the hospital, accompanied by uniformed police every time, she hadn’t left the house since Thomas had been arrested. One of the neighbours was standing outside when the unit had arrived, clutching a stock pot full of Bolognese sauce. She’d told Sally she was coming round, she was sure of it. Just that afternoon. Barely four hours ago. Where could Sally be?

  Nobody knew. Sally Carson and her son had been missing a matter of minutes, and already, all avenues had been exhausted.

  Nobody knew.

  That, I thought, was bullshit. Somebody knew. And I knew where that somebody was.

  As I walked past her desk, the bleached-blonde hotel receptionist gave me a smile and told me to have a nice evening. The clean clothes and the aftershave, I thought. What a waste.

  Getting back into Manchester was a lot easier than getting out. I remembered the old joke about places like this. A good place to come from. As long as you were going somewhere else. But I was starting to recognise things, even by night, even at this speed. Roads, buildings, hills, rivers. As I drove past one I was looking forward to the next. Manchester, I realised with horror, was growing on me.

  Same sergeant at the hospital. Same constable. They smiled and let me through and I wondered, briefly, whether they knew the man in the room they were guarding had turned from cop-killer to witness in the space of an afternoon. Either way, I wasn’t supposed to be here. No one wanted me talking to Thomas Carson by myself. But no one seemed to be stopping me. As I approached I could see him through the window, asleep, or resting, utterly relaxed, and utterly unaware that the one thing keeping him that way was gone. I remembered, just before I walked into the room, what Serena had said, and paused to drop her another text. I’m going to try to talk to Carson.

  “Hello, Francis.”

  He sat up immediately and smiled.

  “Not pretending to be asleep now?”

  “No point. You know I’m not telling you anything.”

  He was right, of course. He had no reason to say a word. In his world, his wife and son were sat in front of the TV eating their dinner with the fire lit and half a dozen police scattered around the house staring at the night. In his world, everything was fine.

  His world no longer existed.

  “Sally’s missing,” I said. He grinned at me. I tried again. “She’s disappeared. Matthew too.”

  “Sure she has,” he replied. I couldn’t blame him. Telling him his family were still in danger was the only way to get him talking. Maybe if I’d realised that earlier, and lied to him, she might not have disappeared at all.

  I slammed my fist down on the table beside his bed. There was a folder there, some flowers, a glass half full of water. The glass shook.

  “I’m not bullshitting you, Carson,” I said, and it was that slip, that word, Carson instead of Grissom that swung it, because the moment he heard it he knew I wasn’t lying. Grissom was my trump card, the ace that told him I knew more about his hand than he wanted me to. Carson was me, desperate, pleading for his help.

  The grin was gone. The world inside Carson’s head was gone, flattened into nothing by the truth.

  “Where are they?”

  “I’ve told you. I don’t know.”

  Now he was shouting, his voice hoarse, the words tearing their way out the throat he’d tried to shut forever.

  “Find them! Get out there and fucking well find them!”

  He was on his feet, his head twisting from side to side, as if Sally and Matthew were in the room with us, hovering just out of view. The door opened, the constable came in, started towards me, and then stopped when he saw I wasn’t on top of Carson at all and certainly not close enough to be causing the kind of pain that would produce a noise like the one he was making now.

  “Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod,” it went. “Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod,” louder and quieter and louder again, his head in his hands, and then his hands up and above him, shaking, supplicating. After all those days of silence, he wa
s making up for it now. The constable was standing by the door, open-mouthed and utterly bewildered. I waited for Carson to go quiet, or at least relatively quiet, because he was still gasping the same three words, over and over.

  “Where is she, Carson?”

  He ignored me. Or maybe he just couldn’t hear.

  “Thomas?”

  On he went, “Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod.”

  “Please. You have to listen to me. We want to find Sally. We want to find Matthew. Do you know where they might be?”

  I spoke gently. He looked right at me, now, and frowned, as if he were surprised to see me there. He stopped talking. I took a step towards him, reached out to put an arm on his shoulder, saw the constable take a step into the centre of the room.

  “Please, Thomas. You’ve got to help us.”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s possible the people who did this have got your wife and your son, and they’re not nice people, are they, Thomas?”

  He shook his head again, but this time he spoke, and it wasn’t gibberish, it was an actual word, and he was looking at me as he said it, so there was at least a chance it was supposed to be a reply.

  “Restaurant,” he said.

  For a moment my mind was blank. Of all the things he might have come up with, restaurant wasn’t getting me any closer to his family. What the hell did restaurant have to do with anything? I opened my mouth to ask him again, and then I remembered.

  “The Italian restaurant?” I asked. “In Burnley?”

  He stared at me. There was nothing there, nothing in his eyes, he didn’t seem to be looking at me at all, just the space in front of him where there was sound and movement and colour.

  “Please, Thomas. Help me. Is it the Italian restaurant? The one that burnt down?”

  Carson took a step back, to the bed, sat down, dropped his chin to his chest, and closed his eyes. I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the constable. “The doctor’ll be here in a moment. But I think you should go. Carson can’t hear you now.”

  He was right. Carson didn’t look like he could hear anything at all.

  I had my phone out and Gaddesdon’s number on the screen before I’d even left the room. The sergeant who’d let me through earlier was walking towards me with a young man in green scrubs with a pinched look and an expression of controlled fury. As Gaddesdon answered the phone, the man grabbed my right arm and asked me what had happened. I winced, hard, shook my head, mumbled, “Sorry,” and hurried away, blinking at the pain that had just shot through me.

  Three things I needed from Gaddesdon. Just three things. The first was to call Malhotra, tell her what I was telling him now, what had just happened, the clue Carson might or might not have given me, and tell her to get down to the hospital as fast as her Nissan would let her and be there when Carson started making sense again. The second was to make the same call to Serena. The third was to give me an address, because I was already in my car, the phone on speaker, the maps app open and the word “Burnley” keyed in. But Burnley alone wasn’t enough. I needed an address.

  Gaddesdon wasn’t in his sharpest mood.

  “An address for what, sir?”

  “The Italian restaurant, for Christ’s sake. Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve just said?”

  “Yes, yes, sorry. But it burnt down, didn’t it?”

  He had a point. Whatever was there now, it wouldn’t be the restaurant Luca Moretti had burned to death in with his wife and children.

  “I know. I guess I’ll start there and move outwards, see who’s there now, what they know, ask some questions. It’s all we’ve got.”

  “It’s not much to go on, sir.”

  He was right there, too. But apart from ohmygod it was the only thing Carson had said, and he’d said it in what had looked remarkably like a moment of sudden lucidity. For the instant in which he’d been granted the time and temporary sanity for a single word, that was the word he’d chosen. If it had been me, I’d have made sure that word was pretty damned important.

  As I approached the barriers that guarded the car park exit, I noticed a red Astra slide into place beside me. Thousands of them, I thought to myself, again, and then I opened the window and looked closer and saw the face of the man who was driving it.

  Bald head. Glasses.

  And sure, thousands of them, too, but in the same car? Here?

  Gaddesdon was still talking. I felt in my pocket for the car park ticket and decided to give up on making him call me Sam.

  “And the address wasn’t in the memo, sir, or the local newspaper article. It just had the name of the place, and the family.”

  Even struggling to find the ticket, even with the Astra beside me and a man in it who I was convinced was following me, even with all that on my mind, I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.

  “So, Gaddesdon, all you’ve got is the name of a restaurant, and the people that ran it, and the date of the fire in which they all died, and searchable reports from the fire brigade and all the local press, and the internet?”

  “Sir.”

  I felt in my other pocket for the ticket. There were two lanes at the exit, two barriers. There was a car behind the Astra, and there had been one waiting behind me, too, but I was taking so long he’d reversed and moved across and now there were two cars lined up behind the Astra. I hadn’t finished with Gaddesdon.

  “I can see your problem, Gaddesdon. I imagine it’ll be the nearest thing to impossible to find out where that restaurant actually was.”

  “OK, sir.”

  My fingers brushed against a piece of card and I pulled it out, triumphant. The ticket. Another car had joined the queue behind the Astra, I noticed, three of them now, and the one at the front suddenly let loose with the horn, a shrill blast into the cold night air. I turned and stared at the bald man, who was looking straight ahead, unmoving. I remembered something important.

  There was another exit to the car park.

  “I’m in the car now. Get hold of Malhotra. Get hold of Serena. Call me as soon as you’ve got the address. Phone’s telling me I’ll be in Burnley in forty minutes. Let’s see if I can make it thirty.”

  I flicked on my hazard lights and opened the door, because if you can’t find your exit ticket it stands to reason you’ll get out and start looking on the floor. Astra man glanced in my direction, saw me staring right at him, and looked away. The car behind him gave another blast, and as I watched he shook his head in defeat, opened his window and fed his card into the machine. Before the barrier on his side had fully lifted I was back in the Fiat with the gearstick slammed into reverse, and ten seconds after the Astra was through I’d turned around and was on my way to an exit that would take him at least ten minutes to reach on the roads outside the hospital.

  Gaddesdon was still talking, but by now I’d zoned him out completely.

  “Call me when you’ve got the address,” I barked, and hung up as I shoved my ticket into the barrier, tapping the steering wheel impatiently as I waited for it to rise. Thirty long seconds later I slid onto the main road on the far side of the hospital. Traffic was light and the directions were clear enough, which gave me time to consider what had just happened.

  Who was Astra man?

  He was a police officer, I was sure of that, I remembered seeing him more than just the once in Folgate. I’d seen the car at Fiona Milton’s funeral, too, but I hadn’t spotted the driver among the mourners. Not that I’d have worried if I had done. The man was a police officer, after all. I’d assumed that put him in the clear, but that assumption had been little short of stupid.

  Tarney was a police officer too.

  I’d seen Astra man talking to Roarkes, I remembered, and I added that to the strain on his face, and the mood swings, and ignoring the leads, and kicking me out of his office. I’d told Gaddesdon to contact Malhotra and Serena, but I hadn’t mentioned Roarkes, which had been an oversight, not a deliberate omission.r />
  But maybe keeping Roarkes in the dark wasn’t such a bad idea.

  The motorway round Manchester was quiet, unlit, relatively dry, and let me hold a steady ninety the whole time I was on it. No sign of the Astra. Hardly another car on the road. The next turn took me dead north, and as the relics of the old mills approached and disappeared either side of the road I realised this was the same route Gaddesdon had taken to drive us to Bursington the first time. So different by night, I thought, the huge old buildings and the hills and the sudden splashes of light in the darkness. Not just different. Extraordinary, somehow. And then I realised I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep for weeks, and I hadn’t eaten all day, so my head was full of that weird long-haul flight sensation where nothing seems quite real. It wasn’t the road or the hills or the mills. It was just me.

  The next motorway beckoned, and as I skidded my way round another misjudged roundabout my phone rang. I couldn’t answer it, not without killing myself or at least slowing down more than I wanted to, so I waited until I was doing seventy in a straight line before I looked down. Below the missed call notification (from Gaddeson, of course) was a text (also from Gaddesdon). Called Mal and Srna, it read. Srna not happy.

  Any number of reasons for that. Could even be because she’d missed out on a drink with me, but I doubted it. I’d done what she’d asked me to, anyway, I’d let her know I was coming to see her client, and it might have been a bit last-minute, but she hadn’t actually said in advance, had she?

  She’d probably meant it, though. She’d probably meant she wanted the kind of warning that would enable her to be there, in the room, while I spoke to her client, so she could give me signals and take me outside and stop me doing the kind of thing that might plunge that client into a catatonic vacuum. I didn’t think Serena on hand would have helped. It hadn’t helped much with Tarney. It wouldn’t have brought Carson out of his shell.